The match plays fair: deeper pool, no regicide, serves from the line

"the player is too weak in this mode. also the killing by smashing occurs too
often. i cant really control it. maybe obsolete? also the serving after the
first serve does not happen from behind the groundline".

matchPlayerHp 8 — the match brings its own pool. The gore mode's 4 was an
inheritance, not a decision, and a real game has rallies you deserve to lose
without the run ending.

Regicide is out of the match (kept in the duel, where any-weapon-counts is
the point of sudden death). In a full game every hard serve that happened to
meet the body was a free kill nobody aimed. A match ball never damages the
opponent — it passes through like a soft ball and racketAI plays it — so the
wound stages are exactly the scoreboard. That also made hp-per-opponent
meaningless, so the ladder escalates in racketAI instead: +12% speed per body
felled, whiff chance x0.82 per rung.

And serving resets to behind the baseline with real deuce/ad mirroring:
setupPoint's "serve from wherever you're standing" branch now excludes the
match, which falls through to the tennis positioning. Verified live: second
serve from z 24.3, x mirrored to the ad side, opponent unwounded by anything
but the score.

38 tests, 15 seeds clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

PROJECT.md

@@ -853,6 +853,23 @@ because the deepest system in the repo (swings, volleys, lanes, the AI) was alre
 **The drill stays in the back room beside it** — triage is a decent idea that failed the
 grasp-in-five-seconds test, and the match is now the lead candidate for the middle mode.
 
+**FOURTEENTH PASS — the match plays fair.** Oliver: *"the player is too weak in this mode. also the
+killing by smashing occurs too often. i cant really control it. maybe obsolete? also the serving
+after the first serve does not happen from behind the groundline"*.
+- **`matchPlayerHp` 8** — the match brings its own pool. The gore mode's 4 was never a decision
+  here, just an inheritance, and a real game has rallies you deserve to lose without the run ending.
+- **REGICIDE IS OUT OF THE MATCH** (kept in the duel, where "any weapon counts" is the point of a
+  sudden-death). In a full game, every hard serve that happened to meet the body was a free kill
+  nobody aimed. A match ball NEVER damages the opponent now — it passes through like a soft ball and
+  racketAI plays it — so the wound stages are exactly the scoreboard with no side-channel smearing
+  them. This also deleted the hp-per-opponent escalation (a deeper pool changes nothing when the
+  body is pure scoreboard): **the ladder escalates in racketAI instead** — `matchSpeedPer` (+12%
+  speed per body felled) and `matchFlubKeep` (whiff chance × 0.82 per rung).
+- **Serving resets to BEHIND THE BASELINE with real deuce/ad mirroring** — `setupPoint`'s splatter
+  branch ("serve from wherever you're standing") now excludes the match, which falls through to the
+  tennis branch. Serving from mid-court where the last rally left you read as a bug because it was
+  one. Verified: second serve from z 24.3, x mirrored to the ad side.
+
 **Open, and every one of them is Oliver's call after he plays it:**
 1. ~~**A ball that carries through the lane can complete two steps at once.**~~ Largely CLOSED by
    the slice removal (seventh pass) — a cut ball picking its own next victim was the main way this